Decision by the Yabloko Federal Political Committee No 159 of 20 October 2022, published on 1.11.2022

Photo: Moscow, Novy Arbat street, February 2022 / Photo by Vitaly Smolnikov, Kommersant

The main reason for the current situation in our country is the failure of post-Soviet modernisation, which, in turn, was due to the refusal of the Russian authorities over the past 30 years to consider society as a subject of politics and regard the freedom and real well-being of people as the main goal of the state.

At the same time, there were real alternatives and opportunities for implementing modernisation reforms in the interests of the country’s citizens. However, the Russian authorities have consistently rejected these alternatives for the sake of narrow-minded selfish reasons.

The refusal to overcome Bolshevism and Stalinism at the state level predetermined the emergence of aggressive imperial national Bolshevism as a state ideology in the 21st century.

The result was the creation of a political and economic system based on legal nihilism of the Bolshevik type and the merger of power and property. Such a state system can neither have a free press, nor an independent judiciary, nor a real parliament, nor fair elections, since if all these independent institutions emerge, then, first, they constitute a threat to the corporate-oligarchic system itself, and second, they do not have funding, because there is no business independent of the state. A deliberate depoliticisation of society takes place in such a system – systematic falsification of elections and massive state propaganda give rise to the “nothing depends on us” syndrome in people. Already in the first decade of its existence, this system demonstrated disregard for human life unleashing two Chechen wars.

Under these conditions, the emergence of an authoritarian head of state and the transformation of the oligarchy of the 1990s into the “Putin state” were neither an accident nor a miscalculation. An authoritarian organisation of power, striving for irremovability, was fixed in the country. It lacks the mechanisms for prevention or correction of the mistakes of the person heading the state, and his personal complexes and fears get transformed into state decisions without taking into account and analysing possible consequences.

Abandoning the political and economic alternative, and never taking up to building of a modern democratic state, Russia found itself in neo-Stalinism and neo-Bolshevism, “wrapped” in a quasi-modern postmodern shell of the “Eurasian” type.

The attempts to oppose this system with populist methods, indiscriminately relying on nationalism, populism, leftism, and pseudo-fight against corruption, and reducing politics to a personal struggle for power, only worsened the situation.

The same representatives of the post-Soviet intelligentsia campaigned for Boris Yeltsin in 1996, for Putin and the [Chechen] war in 1999-2000, and for “smart voting” in 2021  [calling to vote for any parties, even pro-government parliamentary parties including communists-Stalinists, but the ruling United Russia, which led to the formation of the parliament banning the oldest human rights organisation Memorial and voting for the special military operation]. Ten years after the elections of 2011 passed under the slogan “we have to stop the evil” leaving all thoughts and reflections for later. And the evil only grew stronger, being fed with malice, hatred, and the desire for revenge of those who wanted to stop it. Good-meaning people following the lead of the populists, virtually worked for evil – for the promotion of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and nationalists of Zakhar Prilepin [a writer who was a combatant in Donbass and boasted of killing people there], and justification of the very idea of ​​nationalism.

Abandoning the European, liberal-democratic dominant by the Russian opposition movement that took place in this way is one of the immediate causes of the war.

The Yabloko party does not shed the responsibility for what has happened: we developed and proposed alternatives to the dead-end policies, but failed to find enough strength and resources to implement them. The disaster happening to our country is both our disaster and our fault.

It is necessary to understand the causes of what happened not only to determine the perpetrators. Lessons must be learned from the experience of the past 30 years. This is necessary for building the future of Russia, conducting genuine political and economic modernisation, and creating a modern democratic state based on a society aiming at the European way of development. So that those who are responsible for the country do not repeat the mistakes, so that they stop lying and trumping up when faced with a challenge of history.

The supporters of European Russia must have their own dominant, otherwise another, pro-fascist dominant will be realised.

For the sake of the future, our country needs not just the desire for “freedom” instead of “slavery”, but the desire to understand what is happening with the country and build its future not on the basis of populist slogans, but on the position of a real democratic alternative to the failed post-Soviet modernisation.

Grigory Yavlinsky,

Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of Yabloko